


The Storm and the Throne

by whereismygarden



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Ben POV, Coma, F/M, Ficlet, Hopeful Ending, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:00:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24832750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden
Summary: After the Emperor's resurrection, Ben bides his time on Exegol."Edge of light and shade, my broken soul once more enslaved..."
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 12
Collections: Reylo Jukebox Exchange





	The Storm and the Throne

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lubamoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lubamoon/gifts).



> Written for the Reylo Jukebox Exchange (2020). Song prompt was "False Kings" by Poets of the Fall.

The storm never relented on Exegol. Ben was used to it now, the feeling of electrical upset in the air but without the rain that fell on living planets and moons. It prickled at the seams of his armor, made his skin crawl along with the restless, nagging spirits that haunted the planet’s surface.

The three months since he’d wrenched himself from the pit the Emperor had flung him into had not been kind to him. His leg had healed wrong, and he was dressed in the scavenged remnants of his Knights’ armor, still bloodstained and reeking. The Emperor did not permit him to stray any further than one of the wrecked ships of the Rebellion or the destroyed Sith fleet to fetch rations.

He tested his limits as he returned to the stronghold of the temple, using the Force to move some rubble. Underneath the temple, the air was just as charged with dark energy and dust, but without the swirling clouds above, felt more like an unquiet grave. Ben let a piece of rock scrape against the tunnel wall until he felt something external constrict at his heart in his chest.

_Don’t get cocky, boy._ The voice didn’t echo in his head so much as it sliced through it, burning and hissing like a lightsaber. The wounds there would never close: neither the Emperor nor Ben would allow it.

The throne loomed ahead of him, and Ben blinked, seeing double, seeing wrong. He blinked away one of Rey’s memories, of the Emperor laughing manically, an old man held up by hooks and cranes and tubing. The reality before him was worse, somehow.

He sank painfully to one knee. Snoke had insisted on this gesture in the past; perhaps as an echo of the Emperor. It was easy to bow his head, avoid the yellow eyes gleaming in the red-illuminated temple.

The Emperor sat in his monstrous throne, having dispensed with all machinery in favor of cushions and comforts that Ben had hauled from the destroyed fleets. He regarded Ben over his patrician nose, drumming his fingers idly. The Nabooian robes were recreations, but Ben remembered the holos of his youth. The trips to Theed. The style was accurate.

Accurate, too, was the reformed face and body of Emperor Palpatine: no longer the gruesome mutilated Emperor of his parents’ memories, nor the feeble clone he and Rey had confronted right here, nor even the elder statesman of the Senate, the man on the throne looked close to Ben’s age, with only some white in his hair. His stolen vigor almost gleamed in the dim room.

Ben remembered kneeling before Snoke, remembered Rey suspended before his old master. Remembered the blazing relief as he ignited his lightsaber.

“Of course, Snoke underestimated your connection to my granddaughter,” Palpatine said. “You were more closely bound to her than to him.” He smiled a self-satisfied smile. “We no longer have that problem.”

“That you know of,” Ben growled. The Emperor didn’t even bother to punish him for this defiance. Why would he, when he was right? Why would he, when he could read both the despair and hope in Ben’s mind, and know despair was winning? Why would he, when he could sense every time hope and strength were rising in Ben, and crush him accordingly? He had created a perfect chain, a trap made of hope that Ben closed on himself with every thought.

“Ugh,” Palpatine massaged his forehead with a weary hand. “Even Vader’s thoughts weren’t so pitifully circular.”

There was a drawback for the Emperor, of course: in hijacking Rey’s strength, in enslaving their bond, in flaying open Ben’s mind, he was privy most of the time to Ben’s spiraling despair. This was an occasional comfort to Ben, and an asset for one very important reason: there was really only one thing that could stop these grim spirals.

“You can go feed her,” the Emperor relented, sinking into a pose that Ben recognized as preparation to meditate with the ghosts of the Sith.

Ben made his way into the thicket of wires, warped metal, and rubble that lay behind the throne. It was insulated, painstakingly, with the ripped-out cushions of spacecraft seats and ancient Sith tapestries. He had to crawl to enter, like he was a child entering a play fort built under a table.

Cocooned in the center of this nest was a slight, pale figure whose chest scarcely rose and fell more than twice a minute. Rey’s muscles were wasted, her tan washed away in the gloom of the temple, and her hair was lank and dull. Ben had dressed her in his own shirt to warm her, and then wrapped her in Ap’lek’s cloak. The heavy black fabrics only made her look smaller.

Ben clumsily cast off his piecemeal armor and let it fall to the side. Reaching under the layers of cloth, he felt for the weak thread of Rey’s pulse in her arm. Today it was slow and irregular, a not unusual state of affairs. Much worse were the times when it was as fast as a bird’s, or impossible to find at all.

He wriggled his way under the covers with her, wrapping his arms around her body. She was cold: even the breath that sighed from her nose was as cold as the air around them. If Ben held her long enough, she would warm up. Later, he would try and feed her. The tube was, like everything else, scavenged from a fleet ship medbay, and not designed for food. But he made do.

Sometimes he had flashes of Rey’s memory, of gnawing hunger under his ribs, of being so lightheaded he could barely stand in the Jakku sun. It was not a comfort, exactly, that Rey had been in the position to consume worse than protein liquid through a tube in her life, but he could understand her positions on necessity, on doing anything at all to survive.

He pressed his face against the skin of her neck and remembered the feeling of bringing her back to life once before.

They hadn’t understood, either of them, what they had done. That the Emperor had been serious that the spirit of the Sith never died, and that when Ben had breathed life into her body three months ago, he had opened the door to the Emperor’s spirit as well.

Ben was so weak that when Rey had stood and walked over to the Emperor’s body, he hadn’t understood what was happening. All he had felt was a sudden, tremendous disturbance in the Force between him and Rey, as if the space that held both of them like warm water was suddenly cold and crowded, with slimy, fast things clawing at his legs. Then Rey’s presence was faint, far away beneath that water, even as the life brimming between them still surged.

He had been unable to stand or even drag himself forward as Rey—as Rey’s body—bent over the Emperor and the Force bent and thrummed once again.

Palpatine hadn’t so much as caught Rey as she collapsed, her Force energy and all but a little of her life—of Ben’s life—poured into the Emperor. Inside the outline of Rey’s presence in Ben’s mind was that Dark, writhing thing he had known for so long, but this time it was rooted in his soul like Rey had been. Worse than childhood, worse than ever before.

_We’re back to this, then_. The Emperor’s voice had nearly drowned out the resurgence of panic at seeing Rey lying still again in a wave of fear.

Now, Ben clung tighter to Rey and tried to meditate. It was hard, with the Emperor’s own meditation occurring feet away, though unseen.

Reach out with your feelings, Luke had told him and the other students. Ben had never been short of feelings, and he closed his eyes and reached out for Rey.

Her life was only a weak thread, a thin web just strong enough to hold the spider that was the Emperor, and the struggling fly that was Ben. He couldn’t feel her thoughts, her emotions, and it was only the continued presence of her memories and her slow breath that gave him hope that she was still there.

Luke had never bothered to make them recite the Jedi Code. Ben, though, had learned the code his grandfather had held to, and he was glad of it now.

_Peace is a lie, there is only passion._

_Through passion, I gain strength._

_Through strength, I gain power._

_Through power, I gain victory._

_Through victory, my chains are broken._

_The Force shall free me._

The Emperor had moved beyond thoughts of being a Sith, was determined to own the Force itself. But it had been by Sith principles that he had told them he could live through Rey, and so it was through Sith principles that Ben had hope.

“The Force shall free me,” he whispered into Rey’s hair, and maybe he imagined it, but there was a slight tremor in the web, and a frisson of heat burst in his mind—a memory of desert sunlight glancing off metal and sand. The touch of the Emperor on his mind was less consequential when Rey was here, when he could remember that the bond that let Palpatine into his mind and soul was still there because she was still there.

“The Force shall free us,” he repeated, curling himself tighter around her and waiting to hear her speak back.

Over them, he could still feel the storm raging overhead, but he already knew that it could be survived.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello Lubamoon, hope this didn't disappoint. I didn't have time to write something very long, but I liked the tone of the song and hopefully it made for a good fic :)


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